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Recent Cases on the Duties and Roles of Expert Witnesses in Litigation in the United Kingdom and Australia – The Importance of Remaining Independent The firm’s update expands further on.
Construction Litigation Update – July 2021 | Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP jdsupra.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jdsupra.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In
Secretariat Consulting PTE Ltd v A Company, the Court of Appeal considered for the first time the question of an expert s duty to avoid a conflict of interest.(1) The Court of Appeal s decision, while not deciding the point finally, means that it is unlikely that a court will now recognise such a duty as a matter of law. The issue is a matter of contract. On the terms of the expert firm s engagement in this case, the Court of Appeal upheld the High Court s decision to grant an injunction restraining the firm from acting for a third party in a connected arbitration. The judgment contains a useful analysis of when conflicts can arise in related cases and the circumstances in which a large organisation offering expert or litigation support services may find itself conflicted.
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This alert considers two recent English court judgments providing important guidance impacting expert evidence, first as regards conflicts of interest and, second, as regards the risks of an award being challenged for serious irregularity upon a misapplication by the tribunal of a model agreed between quantum experts for assessing damages.
FIRST CASE: COURT OF APPEAL RULES ON CONFLICTS OF INTEREST FOR EXPERTS
The first case we consider is the important decision of the English Court of Appeal in (1)
Secretariat Consulting Pte Ltd, (2)
Secretariat International UK Ltd, (3)
Secretariat Advisors LLC v A Company [2021] EWCA Civ 6. In this case, the Court of Appeal ruled that Secretariat, an international expert services practice, breached a contractual duty to avoid conflicts of interest when it accepted appointments from different parties in related arbitrations. The issues in the case were novel: this was the first